A nice surprise
Quand tu débarque à Oxford et la première personne que tu prends en photo est une travailliste au travail #AnnelieseDodds La classe!
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Cowley Road Carnival 2024
Despite being very tired I had a lovely time at the Cowley Road Carnival. Here are a few pictures, hope you like them!
In Jericho
After the pub and on my way back to South Oxfordshire, I bumped into a few dancers... here are some pictures... and of course, as often, monsieur Greenman
In search of lost time in East Oxford
When the writer Marcel Proust ate a madeleine as an adult and ducked it in his tea, suddenly a whole moment of his childhood came back. Apparently it wasn’t a madeleine in the first drafts of his BIG novel (In Search of Lost Time), but toasted bread. Never mind, the madeleine and/or the bread did the job, the past came rushing back as if it were in the present. There was a bit of that when J. and I went to hear Sharron Kraus at the Port Mahon last Tuesday. I say I went to hear Sharron but there were two other set of musicians there I had not hear before: Sara Wolff and Helen Pearson and I loved listening to them all. A great evening of lovely music organised by Divine Schism. But yes, there was definitely something spooky going on yesterday. Because I was quite early coming to town from Abingdon, I decided to walk all the way down the High street from the centre and as I approached Magdalen College, and saw how many people were squeezed on the pavement, I reme...
Tuesday evening, Port Mahon, Oxford
Reading Alain de Botton still, The Art of Travel . I’m intrigued by his chapter on Wordsworth (what a beautiful family name for a poet!) how he claims that nature makes us better, that we are no longer competitive etc etc Alain describes leaving a meeting in London when he was taken by the usual human bullshit (is he/she more successful, more intelligent, more whatever better than me?) Before going to a concert in East Oxford, I had some time so I went walking in the near nature of the city. My bus stopped at the bottom of St Aldate’s, near the Court, and I decided to sneak into the path leading to Christ Church garden, then instead of turning right into the meadow (I did not have so much time) I went towards Dead’s Man walk ( don’t know why it’s called like that? Check it on Wikipedia! ) Obviously there is nature, or a semblance of it, that didn’t stop many rather disagreeable characters to be walking as if they were in the city of New York after a bad day in the office. I saw...
Le concert des oiseaux
Here we are on a Sunday and I had to go to work today in order to open and later close the building. Hell. Especially when you go out the day before, which does not happen often these days but still... Something helped me a lot this morning, le réveil des oiseaux. At 5 am there's no one out there, absolute silence in Walton Manor, North Oxford, not even a train to be heard and the cows and horses are not yet back on Port Medow, or perhaps they are, but the wind is not carrying their smell and their noises. 5.20 am and the first virtuoso comes to town, that is somewhere in the gardens behind the houses and starts the jam. Soon, other birds are participating. It's not quite a chorus, more like listen to me! me! me! I'm the best! Perhaps similar to The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, with my favourite track, maybe because it is completely bonkers, Salt peanuts. No, the morning birds are perhaps not p...
Sebald on my arse or, La république des livres
As some of you know, or rather as most of you don't know, I'm currently doing an MA in English at Nottingham University. Almost finished now. I 'just' need to write a dissertation, and as you could choose a creative writing option, well guess what? I chose that. I'm writing (attempting to write) about Oxford. My favourite subject, at Nottingham, was to read about literary geographies. There I discovered the wonderful world of a psychogeographical Will Self , the poetry in prose of Kathleen Jamie 's Findings , Robert McFarlane and his big books full of encyclopedic knowledge such as The Old Ways , and more work by Ballard (whom I knew but 'only' the scifi author). Even classics, such as Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein , can also be read for their fantastic descriptions of landscape. So yes I thought, what's the place I know most in this country? The place where I've lived most of my adult life? The place where I believe I have a good objectif ...
yes sorry... but a survey?
still busy writing this book.... to keep you occupied and out of mischief for a while, perhaps you could fill in the survey for the Ultimate Picture Palace ? It is my favourite cinema in Oxford and has so many foreign films showing it is great!
